Page 39 of The Lady Makes Her Mark

He considered whether she might be amused by a recounting of his reaction to his first—and only—slug from the coachman’s flask. Whatever it contained, he felt certain she could use it to thin paint.

But he remembered what she had said the night before about his failed attempts at humor.

“Entirely,” he said instead. Again.

He had no intention of mentioning the solitary rider who had kept pace with them just long enough to catch even the coachman’s notice—and to make that ordinarily taciturn fellow recall a rather hair-raising tale about a three-fingered highwayman—before shearing off northward and being lost to sight.

Alistair had never before been prone to flights of fancy, had strenuously avoided them in fact, and he didn’t intend for that to change now.

Once they reached his home, he would order things so that he and Constantia saw very little of one another, as it should be. They would put this strange, intimate interlude behind them.

As night fell, he spotted the approach to Rylemoor, marked by a wrought iron gate suspended between two stone pillars. He hoped that bit of fancywork would put her mind at ease, though he’d never employed a gatekeeper. Those were wages he couldn’t afford to waste, not when there was nothing and no one from which the house needed to be guarded. Bleak and treacherous moorland stretched in every direction, with nothing more than outcroppings of stones or a few scrub trees for an intruder to hide behind. For an abbey, and a religious community bent on isolation from the world, it was the perfect spot.

But he had often wondered whether the long-ago king who’d presented this particular earldom to Alistair’s ancestor had intended the gesture as reward or punishment.

The house itself was hardly more inviting. Over everything loomed the dilapidated west wing, made up by and large of the former church, which he would dearly love to raze. Unfortunately, even tearing down required funds.

They rolled to a stop on the graveled courtyard, surrounded on three sides by weathered stone walls that blocked what little daylight remained. He had not expected his sisters to be waiting in the cold to greet him, arriving as he was in unexpected fashion and later than he’d hoped. But evidently even the servants had been caught out. Alistair swung down and opened the carriage door himself.

“Welcome, Miss Cooper,” he said with a flourish that was only a little self-mocking, “to Rylemoor Abbey.”